What I always loved about the sudden concern about the VCR fragmenting family viewing was that the people complaining the loudest were also the worst control freaks. In most households with this issue, particularly mine, the real concern was “The rest of the family isn’t watching what _I_ want to watch.” They weren’t about to pay for video rentals, and they rapidly lost power when the rest of the family noted “we have to watch this rental since we paid money for it,” with the additional fear of paying late fees if the control freak was insistent. (My sister was a classic case: she’d whine like Eric Cartman if she didn’t get complete control of TV viewing, particularly on Saturday mornings. The rule in my house once we got a VCR was that paid videos took priority, and that drove her NUTS.)
I loved going to the video store and walking the aisles. The best was when a really popular movie was released to video, the store would buy multiple copies. E.T. comes to mind.
Love the Star Ledger reference! I can still see my grandmother reading that paper.
My Grandmother started and ended the day with the paper. In the morning: black coffee, cigarettes, a bowl of raisin bran. Right before bed: black coffee, cigarettes, a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
Some of my family were early adopters and they immediately misused the VCR. The 1981 movie Ghost Story has a naked guy fall out of a window. You don't see anything on screen, but with the magic of frame by frame advance you can pause the video with his junk visible.
I don't think a VCR would've been any different than a second household TV in terms of people consuming their own individual entertainment. Not that we had a second TV - we weren't Rockefellers. But the VCR did bring the family together to watch movies in a way that network TV didn't. A movie at home was special.
For multiple years, it made home movie watching an event again. Plus, I loved the time-shifting. Even before I became obsessed with recording just about everything, the freedom I felt to go out and not miss a show took a consideration off my plate.
You know why I would have loved to have a VCR in my bedroom? My movie taste and my mom’s were not the same. The VCR, like cable before it was not a cause. It was an effect. The TV choices we had were terrible. In a good city, you had ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and maybe one or two independent stations. We watched TV together because we had so few and bad choices. The reason we flocked to streaming was an overpriced cable option with poor choices with anything you wanted to watch in excellent quality at any time. So now we all could watch watch what we wanted. True freedom!
Buying tape rewinders because that wore down your VCR.
Paying $39.95 plus tax to have someone take them apart and clean them.
Some video store chains only had a few stores, but you could rent from 1 store and return it to another (Mike’s Video in State College and Bellefonte, PA).
I was trying to describe to my Gen Z daughters what it was like back in the '80s and '90s - how new episodes of TV shows only aired once a week (or even less, sometimes it would be a rerun!), and how the next day at school or at work everyone would be talking about it. Even if your family had a VCR, they were quite finicky to program and it was not uncommon to get home and find out it only recorded half the program or didn't record at all, and now you had just missed THE BEST EPISODE EVER, THAT ALL YOUR FRIENDS WERE TALKING ABOUT and you'd have to wait until some unspecified time in the future when it aired as a rerun. Or how Christmas specials were only aired once a year, at Christmas - and if you weren't home that night, you didn't get to watch Charlie Brown or Rudolph or whatever that year.
They were just gobsmacked by this concept.
I do agree with your grandmother to some extent; the invention of the videocassette was the beginning of the end of the shared culture. While I spent most of my teenage and young adult years (80's and 90s) loudly proclaiming how totally lame most mainstream pop culture was, there is something to be said for the shared experience.
"Reading this second article, you can easily apply these concerns to that technology and see why people were worried then, and are perhaps even more worried now." Yep: fretting about individuals going off to each watch their own things and not share experiences didn't begin with streaming. GeorgeLucasTheyRhyme.gif
> This first article gave you a sense of where we were. The second article, published the next day, was titled "VCR Revolution Viewed as a Peril to Togetherness of Family Life."
Given the sorry state of "family life" and "togetherness" we're in now, and how we progressively got from the 80s onwards, it's amazing how prescient and correct those warnings were...
I was a teenager back in the 80's and while the VCR was a technological marvel, it very quickly turned my friends and I into a bunch of movie watching coach potatoes. At one point I realized that you can be in the same room with other people and still be miles away from them, that spending every weekend doing nothing but watching movie rentals was kinda lame, so eventually I put my foot down and said - guy's we're going out - I had no idea where but any place was better than on the couch watching videos.
We ended up descending on a near-by pool hall and started hanging out and shooting pool. Coincidentally, we ran into some other people from high school doing the same and suddenly my group of friends doubled in size. Every weekend we were out with this huge group of people, it made senior year the best year ever.
So many memories of going to the video store, then going to the one across town because the first was out of the movie you wanted.
I remember the small space dedicated to beta tapes, and said space shrinking as people embraced VHS.
I don't remember creating distance between me and the family.
I feel the same way. Most of family loved everything about our VCR. It made my grandmothers standoffishness stand out even more.
It must have made for awkward weekends when she came over😅
I'm guess they were right to a point. I remember some days when I wanted to stay inside watching movies, but those were very few.
I wonder what she would make of our current situation, where millennials are now being coached on how to answer the phone 🤳🏾
I think it would be beyond the scope of her ability to understand.
What I always loved about the sudden concern about the VCR fragmenting family viewing was that the people complaining the loudest were also the worst control freaks. In most households with this issue, particularly mine, the real concern was “The rest of the family isn’t watching what _I_ want to watch.” They weren’t about to pay for video rentals, and they rapidly lost power when the rest of the family noted “we have to watch this rental since we paid money for it,” with the additional fear of paying late fees if the control freak was insistent. (My sister was a classic case: she’d whine like Eric Cartman if she didn’t get complete control of TV viewing, particularly on Saturday mornings. The rule in my house once we got a VCR was that paid videos took priority, and that drove her NUTS.)
I loved going to the video store and walking the aisles. The best was when a really popular movie was released to video, the store would buy multiple copies. E.T. comes to mind.
Love the Star Ledger reference! I can still see my grandmother reading that paper.
My Grandmother started and ended the day with the paper. In the morning: black coffee, cigarettes, a bowl of raisin bran. Right before bed: black coffee, cigarettes, a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
They are pretty evil. Take up so much space and I can’t go to a thrift store without coming home and finding more space lost… EVIL I TELL YOU!
OUR EYES ARE OPEN!!
I remember my family owned the vhs tape rewinder that was shaped like a car!
I worked at Suncoast Video for a while and we sold a lot of those at Christmas time.
Omg Suncoast!! I forgot about that place.
Some of my family were early adopters and they immediately misused the VCR. The 1981 movie Ghost Story has a naked guy fall out of a window. You don't see anything on screen, but with the magic of frame by frame advance you can pause the video with his junk visible.
Haha. I worked in a few video stores and that movie was very popular for that reason.
I don't think a VCR would've been any different than a second household TV in terms of people consuming their own individual entertainment. Not that we had a second TV - we weren't Rockefellers. But the VCR did bring the family together to watch movies in a way that network TV didn't. A movie at home was special.
For multiple years, it made home movie watching an event again. Plus, I loved the time-shifting. Even before I became obsessed with recording just about everything, the freedom I felt to go out and not miss a show took a consideration off my plate.
BETAMAX4LIFE!
No need to panic about BETA. Turns out, not evil.
You know why I would have loved to have a VCR in my bedroom? My movie taste and my mom’s were not the same. The VCR, like cable before it was not a cause. It was an effect. The TV choices we had were terrible. In a good city, you had ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and maybe one or two independent stations. We watched TV together because we had so few and bad choices. The reason we flocked to streaming was an overpriced cable option with poor choices with anything you wanted to watch in excellent quality at any time. So now we all could watch watch what we wanted. True freedom!
“Be Kind, Rewind”
Buying tape rewinders because that wore down your VCR.
Paying $39.95 plus tax to have someone take them apart and clean them.
Some video store chains only had a few stores, but you could rent from 1 store and return it to another (Mike’s Video in State College and Bellefonte, PA).
I was trying to describe to my Gen Z daughters what it was like back in the '80s and '90s - how new episodes of TV shows only aired once a week (or even less, sometimes it would be a rerun!), and how the next day at school or at work everyone would be talking about it. Even if your family had a VCR, they were quite finicky to program and it was not uncommon to get home and find out it only recorded half the program or didn't record at all, and now you had just missed THE BEST EPISODE EVER, THAT ALL YOUR FRIENDS WERE TALKING ABOUT and you'd have to wait until some unspecified time in the future when it aired as a rerun. Or how Christmas specials were only aired once a year, at Christmas - and if you weren't home that night, you didn't get to watch Charlie Brown or Rudolph or whatever that year.
They were just gobsmacked by this concept.
I do agree with your grandmother to some extent; the invention of the videocassette was the beginning of the end of the shared culture. While I spent most of my teenage and young adult years (80's and 90s) loudly proclaiming how totally lame most mainstream pop culture was, there is something to be said for the shared experience.
"Reading this second article, you can easily apply these concerns to that technology and see why people were worried then, and are perhaps even more worried now." Yep: fretting about individuals going off to each watch their own things and not share experiences didn't begin with streaming. GeorgeLucasTheyRhyme.gif
Blockbuster: be kind, rewind
> This first article gave you a sense of where we were. The second article, published the next day, was titled "VCR Revolution Viewed as a Peril to Togetherness of Family Life."
Given the sorry state of "family life" and "togetherness" we're in now, and how we progressively got from the 80s onwards, it's amazing how prescient and correct those warnings were...
And it all came to pass, just like the man feared
Your grandmother was right!
I was a teenager back in the 80's and while the VCR was a technological marvel, it very quickly turned my friends and I into a bunch of movie watching coach potatoes. At one point I realized that you can be in the same room with other people and still be miles away from them, that spending every weekend doing nothing but watching movie rentals was kinda lame, so eventually I put my foot down and said - guy's we're going out - I had no idea where but any place was better than on the couch watching videos.
We ended up descending on a near-by pool hall and started hanging out and shooting pool. Coincidentally, we ran into some other people from high school doing the same and suddenly my group of friends doubled in size. Every weekend we were out with this huge group of people, it made senior year the best year ever.
Always listen to grandma!
I loved movies, still do, but the times from my youth not spent in front of some screen was so much more valuable memory-wise.